ARTIFICIAL HELLS

delegated performance
‘La Monnaie Vivante’, Tate Modern, 2008. Tania Bruguera, Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008
(foreground); Compagnie les Gens d’Uterpan, X-Event 2, 2007 (background).
six- hour live installation by Sanja Iveković (Delivering Facts, Producing
Tears, 1998– 2007) to fleeting instruction pieces by Lawrence Weiner
(shooting a rifle at a wall, emptying a cup of sea water onto the floor).
This led to some sublime juxtapositions, such as Santiago Sierra’s Eight
People Facing A Wall (2002) as the backdrop to Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s
Whisper #5 (2008, two mounted policemen demonstrating crowd- control
techniques on the audience), which in turn circled around six dancers holding
poses, and salivating onto the floor, choreographed by Annie Vigier
and Franck Apertet.
The title of Bal- Blanc’s exhibition is taken from Pierre Klossowski’s
enigmatic and near impenetrable book of the same name, published in
1970, in which he argues for a troubling mutual imbrication of the economy
and pleasure (jouissance), rather than perceiving them to be separate
domains. The ‘living currency’ of his title is the human body. Building on
his analyses of Fourier and Sade (most notably in ‘Le Philosophe scélérat’,
1967), Klossowski’s text is organised around the premise that industrial
mechanisation introduces new forms of perversion and pleasure. 33 Klossowski
defines perversion as the separation that occurs as soon as the
human is aware of a distinction between reproductive instincts and pleasure
(‘voluptuous emotion’): this first perversion distinguishes the human
from the mechanical, the functional from the non- functional, but it is
subsequently appropriated and contained by institutions as a way to
organise the processes of production towards specific and highly policed
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